How Should Jews Respond to Rampant Antisemitism and the Growing Threat of Autocracy?

How can Jews get through the next four years? The same way we’ve gotten through the last 4,000. By doing what the Haters hate most about us, reaffirming our core values of Conscience and Questioning.

I’ve seen lots of responses lately to the age-old question: Why do so many people hate the Jews?

Some say it’s because we are considered a source of evil in the world, a controlling force that seeks domination, whether on the left or the right.

Others say, in contrast, that it’s not because we are a malevolent force, but because we are too good. In the face of unmitigated oppression, brutality and falsehood, we assert that all are created in God’s image and deserve to live a life of dignity. That goody-goodyness is what most pissed off Adolf Hitler, even more than our supposed aspirations for world domination.

He wrote in Mein Kampf:

Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish, like circumcision….I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge; from the dirty and degrading modifications of a falsehood called conscience and morality.

In a new book about antisemitism, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Jew? and a new film based on it, Tragic Awakening, Rabbi Ronald Shore claims that Hitler’s hatred for the Jews was actually based more on fear than hate.

“He didn’t want to kill the Jews because they were bad; he wanted to kill them because they were good,” wrote David Suissa in a Jewish Journal piece about Shore’s film.

Suissa, quoting the film, continues:

The Jews, with their ethics and life-driven ideals, represented a direct threat to Hitler’s Darwinian vision where the frail and the weak would be left behind. “Hitler believed that if the ideas of humanitarianism, love, equality, democracy were to succeed, that would be the end of humanity…The ideology of social Darwinism argued that civilized societies were harming humanity by helping the poor, the sick, and those who nature would have killed off.”

In Shore’s eye, the Jews were not a physical threat to Hitler but a moral threat. And that’s why, even when the war was lost in 1944, Hitler marshaled all of his remaining power toward annihilating the Jews.

Authoritarian leaders always have a problem with moral codes that exist outside of their personal code of conduct and their whims. Jews stand for a law that promotes kindness and human dignity, and that’s why autocratic leaders from time immemorial have hated us.

• So perhaps the most Jewish way to act in the face of a new administration that has openly pledged to be cruel is to stand up to the cruelty.

I’m not saying we need to stand against every act, every policy, every word Trump utters. We just need to be the conscience of America, along with others who wish to join us. It’s why they haters hate us, so we might as well not shrink from the challenge. We need to be true to who we are. Not to “resist” or be “anti-Trump” or “anti” anything. We just need to be what we are meant to be. We need to be “pro” kindness.

Yes, Jews are the conscience of the world and that’s why bad people are sick and tired of us. I’ve made that same point many times. But I’d like to go one step further.

It’s not just that we have always stood up for the dignity of the individual, even when it meant questioning a supreme authority. For in fact, the Jewish proclivity to question authority exists even when it has nothing to do with human dignity or morality. We challenge all authority, including dictators and kings - including God - and we challenge ideas as well. Judaism has no formal set of beliefs that one must hold in order to be Jewish.

• The only acceptable dogma in Judaism is that there is no dogma.

There is only one truth that we hold to be self evident, and it is that, ultimately, no human being, however charismatic, no government, foreign or domestic, no media monolith, controls the truth.

Truth belongs to God alone, and just as God is ultimately unknowable, so is truth.

I believe that for the Jews the idea that God’s name is unpronounceable and God’s image unimaginable is a signal that human beings cannot fathom complete, objective Truth. Truth, like God, is beyond human understanding. And so we are liberated to question everything. That’s why the first Jewish ritual a young child participates in is the asking of a question - four of them, in fact, at a Passover Seder.

Of course, since everything can be questioned, even questioning itself can be challenged. So we have Saadiah Gaon (882-942), whose Book of Beliefs and Opinions asserted that there are knowable, self-evident truths - dogmas - which he employed to ward off the heretical Karaite sect, a group that rejected rabbinic Judaism in favor of a more literal interpretation of scripture.

But when Jews think about champion dogmatists, our “Best in Show” is Maimonides (1135-1204) and his “Thirteen Principles of Faith” that appeared in his introduction to chapter 10 of the talmudic tractate of Sanhedrin. He asserted that anyone who doesn’t accept these ten assertions as irrefutable is a heretic (using the Greek / rabbinic term apikores, based on Epicureanism, a word that can also simply mean “skeptic”).

Here is Maimonides’ list of Jewish dogmas.

• God exists

• God is a perfect unity

• God has no physical body

• God preceded all being

• God alone is to be the object of worship

• God speaks to humans through prophets

• Moses will never be surpassed as a prophet

• The Torah is from heaven

• The Torah is eternal

• God is all-knowing

• God rewards good and punishes transgression

• The Messiah will redeem Israel

• The dead will be resurrected

Maimonides’ list eventually was widely accepted in the Jewish world - even being packaged as a popular prayer (Yigdal) but not before there was major pushback. Some questioned whether he believed his own dogmas. He was accused, ironically, of not believing in the resurrection of the dead, even though it’s on his list. Many cherry picked from the bunch, for example, Abraham Ibn Ezra, who rejected the fourth, contending that God created the world out of preexisting matter.

In a supreme act of chutzpah, the Talmud even questioned whether Moses was the preeminent prophet, number seven of Maimonides’ thirteen. Sanhedrin 21b states that Ezra is greater than Moses: “If Moses had not preceded him, Ezra would have been worthy to have the Torah revealed to Israel through him.” Midrash Genesis Rabbah 14:34 thinks the prophet Balaam, who wasn’t even an M.O.T., topped Moses.

Much of the pushback had to do more with style than substance. Maimonides was a rationalist and many of his critics favored a more mystical approach. Others rejected dogma because it sounds too Christian to assert that “you must believe this to be one of us” - and it is.

When it comes down to it, you can’t push dogma on a people who simply want to challenge established convention and who value deed over creed. We were a people who preferred to break things long before Donald Trump entered the china shop.

So to sum up, Judaism finally got around to having dogma in the Middle Ages, many centuries after the Talmud was compiled, and it was not universally accepted. At the core of our belief system is an inherent mistrust of core belief systems. Or at least an inbred skepticism of ideas, no matter how powerful they might be. If they are unquestioned, we Jews will find a way to question them. Even our own.

And that’s what we need to do now, and it drives the haters crazy. We refuse to fall into line. We are all like Natan Sharansky, who famously zigged when he was told to zag his way to freedom across the bridge in Berlin, as a final act of defiance toward his Soviet tormentors.

Sharansky, wearing a fur hat, is escorted by U.S. Ambassador Richard Burt after being released to cross the border between East Germany and West Berlin on the Glienicke Bridge, the so-called Bridge of Spies, during a prisoner exchange on Feb. 11, 1986 Günter Schneider/ullstein bild via Getty Images

So, fellow Jews, no matter who tells you to fall into line, don’t. It’s not about whether or not to give the new administration the benefit of the doubt. It’s about giving no one the benefit of the doubt.

Here’s an example from the Midrash of how conscience and questioning can come into play:

In Leviticus Rabbah, there is a discussion about whether to shun or treat with compassion individuals who have become marginalized through no fault of their own - in other words, whether to follow the letter of the law, which in these cases is to shun them, or to show kindness.  The example given is someone born out of wedlock, who is supposed to be shunned for ten generations.

One rabbi looks at a verse written in the book of Ecclesiastes, which states, “Behold the tears of…the oppressed, and they have no comforter.”  He then states: “It is written: ‘and they have no comforter’ – and thus God declares: I must be their comforter.”

What a brilliant line.  GOD will be their comforter!  Comforter from what?  According to this subversive rabbinic story, the oppression being discussed in the verse, is the law itself.  The oppressors are those who cling to the letter of the law rather than to its spirit. God is saying, “That’s a dumb law!”

This Midrash gets it. The ancient rabbis got it: Don’t use law to oppress!  The law is supposed to make us a more caring society, not a more obedient one.  Don’t fall into the knee-jerk response of following a practice that goes against your moral instincts, simply because it’s the way it’s always been done; it’s the stock answer, the command of someone you think is God. “Remember,” the Midrash is telling us:  God loves the outcasts! And not even the law itself is immutable.

The reality is this: All people deserve to be loved, because all are created in God’s image.  And we’ll be the annoying bee in the autocrat’s bonnet.

If people are going to hate us for that, so be it. We can handle this.

Since it was Hitler’s struggle to release the world from the “burdens” of morality and restraint, all the more is it our crusade to reinforce those so-called burdens.  It is our task to champion conscience and stand up to power.  Our struggle – our Kampf, so to speak – is to subdue that inclination to follow the crowd and mindlessly obey the orders of impulse.

So how can Jews get through the next four years? The same way we’ve gotten through the last 4,000. By being who we are - and damn proud of it.